Comments on: How can I format an external hard drive to be used with Time Machine?

By: Jordan Francis

Jordan Francis — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 01:54:00 +0000

The first thing you should do when you get a new harddrive is erase it and reformat it. Open up disk utility and find your harddrive list in the sidebar on the left side of the window. Click on the DISK not the DISK IMAGE. The actual disk will be listed first and NOT indented. Then click on the second option from the left, titled “erase”. On this page, click the “Format” drop down menu and select either “Mac OS Extended (Journaled)” or “MS-DOS”. The former will make your harddrive exclusively work with OS X but will perform better and “MS-DOS” will allowed it to play nicely with either OS X or Windows. Then name your partition in the prompt below.

After the reformat finishes, you will be able to select it as your Time Machine HDD. Open up Time Machine Preferences and click the “Select Disk” option. Then, click on your Harddrive. It should work no problem.

By: SoGua

SoGua — Thu, 19 Aug 2010 01:39:00 +0000

Start your Mac:-
* Go to Finder -> Application -> Utilities
* Double click for Disk Utility
* Select the external Hard Disk you wish to format at the left column
* Click on the Erase tab
* At the “Volume Format” select “MS-DOS File System”
* If you confirm to format your hard disk for mac and windows, Click on “Erase” button.
* Pop up window will ask to verify the erase procedure. Click the erase button again in the window to start the erase process.
* All the data in the external hard disk will be permanently removed after this steps.
* Once the erase process finish, your external hard disk can be use for Time Machine backup purpose.
* You must make sure your External HDD have a equal or larger space compare to your Macbook Pro

By: Oron Joffe

Oron Joffe — Wed, 18 Aug 2010 22:13:00 +0000

So what is the question?